"You have to go to Juniper Flats," she said.
Silas looked at her.
"The land office," she said. "Paper. You told me men like Hale write
everything down because paper is how they steal without touching. Go and
look at what the springs are worth on paper. Then we will know what we are
standing in front of."
"I don't like leaving you alone."
"The rifle stays. The trap line is empty β you pulled them all, remember?
And Dokan is watching the trails." She lifted her chin. "Go. Before Aikens
decides your stupidity was an act."
"It was an act."
"Then go before he figures that out too." She shifted the rifle on her knees.
"And Silas β when you are in the land office, look at the dates. Not just the
names. Hale's men are careful with names. They are careless with dates. A
man who steals in a hurry always is."
He stared at her. "How do you know that?"
46
"Because the trap that caught me was set in a hurry." Her voice was flat.
"The stake was shallow. The chain was too long. A careful man sets a trap
you never see. A hurried man sets one you survive." She met his eyes. "Go
and find me his hurry."
That night Silas walked the trap line the way he did every night now β not
to check traps, there were none left, but to make sure none had come back.
The canyon held its breath around him. He stopped at the two graves under
the cottonwood, as he always did, and stood a while with his hat in his hands.
"I made somebody a promise," he told Martha and Lucy, quietly, the way
he'd been talking to them for eight years. "Don't know yet if it's a wise one. It
never stopped you before, either of you, so I expect you'll understand."
The cottonwood said nothing, which was its way of listening.
He rode out at first light with Slate's steady trot eating the miles and a canvas
sack of cornmeal and dried beef for the road, because Saya had insisted he
take food as if he were going to war, and in a way he supposed he was. The
trail down CaΓ±on Seco opened into the long valley, and Silas let his mind run
the way it always did on long rides β back over the freight years, the wagon
ruts and river crossings, Martha laughing at him when he tried to sing, Lucy
asleep against his shoulder on the wagon seat with her thumb in her mouth at
an age when she was far too old for it.
Eight years. The flood had taken them in a single night, and he had spent the
years since making himself small enough that nothing could be taken again.
A cabin. A gelding. Two graves. That had been the whole of Silas Wren, and
it had worked, right up until a woman in a trap had asked him for water and
ruined it.
He didn't resent it. That was the strange part. He'd expected to β he'd braced
47
for it, the way you brace for a kick. But the resentment never came. What
came, riding down out of the canyon with the sun climbing, was something
closer to relief: as if he'd been holding his breath for eight years and someone
had finally told him he could let it out.
By midmorning the heat was standing on the land like something with
weight, and by noon Juniper Flats rose out of the shimmer: a dozen
false-front stores along a single rutted street, a church with a leaning steeple,
the assay office, the saloon with its batwing doors, and the land office
squatting at the far end with a sign that had been repainted so many times the
letters stood out like scars.
Silas tied Slate at the rail and went in, and the bell over the door announced
him to a room that smelled of dust and ink and old paper. Behind a counter
stacked with ledgers sat a small man with spectacles and ink on three fingers,
copying something in a hand so neat it looked printed.
"Help you?" the man said without looking up.
"Looking at water filings," Silas said. "Three Springs country."
The pen stopped. The man looked up, and his eyes did a quick inventory β
the trail dust, the worn boots, the revolver β and decided Silas was harmless
enough to be helpful to.
"Quill," he said, extending an ink-stained hand. "Deputy clerk. The filings
are public record. The wall's public." He waved at the far wall, where bound
volumes stood in rows like soldiers. "Anything recent's in the new book.
Help yourself."
Silas took down the new book. It was heavy. He laid it on the counter and
turned pages, and Quill watched him for a while and then, being a talkative
man in a lonely office, drifted over.
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"You'll want the index," Quill said. "Water rights, by drainage. Three Springs
is under Cobre Creek watershed, pages forty through sixty, roughly."
The wall of volumes drew Silas's eye while Quill talked β decades of
claims, transfers, disputes, all bound in leather gone gray with dust, each
spine stamped with a year. A whole county's water, reduced to ink. He
thought about the springs themselves, the way the water came up cold and
clear through the rock no matter who signed what, and felt the familiar anger
of a man who'd spent his life watching paper eat the world.
Silas found the pages. And then he stood very still, because the pattern was
there on the paper as plain as hoofprints in mud: twelve water-rights filings
in the last six months, every one of them ringing Three Springs like a fence
line β the upper fork, the lower fork, the seep at the canyon head, the spring